Known disk utilization monitoring techniques for systems running the IBM i operating system utilize auxiliary storage pool (ASP)-level monitoring. An ASP is a group of disk drives in a System i® (also known as iSeries®) platform. The grouping of disk drives in an ASP organizes data to limit the impact of storage device failures and to reduce recovery time. If a disk failure occurs, only the data in the ASP containing the failed unit needs to be recovered. ASPs may also isolate objects with similar performance attributes, thereby improving performance. In the System i® platform, it is typical for all disk drives to be assigned to a single ASP. The System i® and iSeries® platforms are computer system platforms offered by International Business Machines Corporation located in Armonk, New York. System i® and iSeries® are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.
ASP-level monitoring tracks an increase in size of disk utilization at the level of the ASP, but not at the level of an actual library or object created on top of the ASP. Known monitoring of disk utilization at the ASP level is a manual approach, which includes logging onto the System i® ASP to analyze which library or object caused the monitored increase in the size of the ASP.
Generating a spooled disk utilization report using the known disk utilization monitoring techniques takes a significant amount of time, typically four to 17 hours, thereby making real time disk utilization data unavailable. Generating the disk utilization report use the PRTDIRINF/RTVDIRINF commands and/or the PRTDSKINF/RTVDSKINF commands. The PRTDIRINF (also known as (a.k.a.) Print Directory Information) command prints attributes of objects in the integrated file system, where the attributes of the objects are collected by the RTVDIRINF (a.k.a. Retrieve Directory Information) command. The PRTDSKINF (a.k.a. Print Disk Information) command prints disk space information that was stored in a database file by the RTVDSKINF (a.k.a. Retrieve Disk Information) command.
Because of the significant amount of time to generate the disk utilization report using known techniques, the analysis of the disk utilization data must be delayed, which increases a risk of outages or failure to obtain objectives of service level agreements.